Presentation applications such as Microsoft PowerPoint® can be used to graphically display information in the form of a slide show. Typically, as the presenter speaks, s/he operates the presentation application running on a computer to cycle through a series of slides, which can be displayed on a large screen which is visible to members of an audience. To make a presentation to a remotely located audience over the internet, a URL may be obtained from a Microsoft server and sent via email. Also, a web based presentation application such as SlideRocket® or the presentation component of Google Docs® can be used. SlideRocket® allows a presenter to upload a presentation to a website, and email the URL to remote audience members. With SlideRocket® or Microsoft PowerPoint®, remotely located audience members can view the slide show by viewing the content at the URL at the time the presentation is made. When the presentation begins, the content at the URL is the first slide. As the presenter cycles through the slide show, the content at the URL is updated with the current slide, so that the remote audience members can follow the presentation as it is made.
Google Docs is a suite of programs that allows users to create and store documents online. Google Docs includes a presentation application. A user can view and edit his or her documents from any computer with an Internet connection. The owner of a document can also give other users viewing or editing rights. Using Google Docs, a presenter can create a presentation online (or upload one created on a client). The presentation is stored on a server, and each slide of the presentation has its own URL. When the presenter cycles through the slides of the presentation using Google Doc's presentation application, the URL being viewed is updated to the URL of the current slide. To allow a remote user to view the presentation, the owner of the presentation can give the remote user viewing rights. The remote user can then cycle through the slides of the presentation independently.
Another way to make a client or web based presentation available to remote users is with a screen sharing program, such as WebEx. A screen sharing program allows the presenter to authorize remote users to view the content of the presenter's screen on their monitors. Thus, as the presenter cycles through a client based presentation (using, e.g., PowerPoint) or a web based presentation (using, e.g., the Google Docs presentation application), as the slides of the presentation change on the user's monitor, so too are the remote user's monitors updated to display the current slide.
Presentation applications are very useful, and are frequently used in business, the sciences, academia, primary education and other fields of endeavor. However, audience members are often particularly interested in a small number of specific presentation slides, and have difficulty isolating the specific information of interest. Sometimes the presentations are made available to audience members as files or printouts, but an audience member may be interested in, for example, three slides out of five hundred. Looking through the whole presentation for the slides of interest can be time consuming and frustrating. Sometimes audience members use phone cameras to take pictures of the screen as it is displaying a slide of interest, but the resulting images are often distorted or of poor quality, particularly if the audience member is not directly in front of the screen or the room lighting is poor.
Furthermore, audience members would often like to share specific slides of interest in real-time, via social networks such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. However, the presentation is not directly accessible for sharing in real-time as it is being presented. The sharing program SlideShare allows users to upload presentations to a website and subsequently share them with other users. However, this does not allow the sharing of presentations in real-time. Instead, the users with whom an uploaded presentation is shared can scroll through the presentation independently. Furthermore, the uploading and sharing in SlideShare is at the level of the entire presentation, where users are often interested in only sharing one or more individual slides. Sharing the entire presentation passes on the problem discussed above of having to look through all of the slides for a small number of slides of interest. This is an even greater burden for users with whom the presentation is shared, because they were not present at the original presentation, and do not even know what slides they are looking for.
It would be desirable to address these issues.